Post navigation

Repositories Visualized

On 12/14/05 10:26 AM, Richard Green wrote on the sakai-library mailing list:The RepoMman projectat the University of Hull, UK, is looking into the areaof workflow as related to an institutional repository. Hull sees a digitalrepository as being a tool for its users, assisting them to develop a ‘pieceof work’ (a generic term intended to cover almost anything) from inceptionto final form – supporting such things as development, collaboration andversioning along the way. In other words, we see a repository as much morethan a container only for ‘finished’ digital objects. We are playing withthe acronym ‘AMP’ (access, management, preservation) to describe some of therelated functionality.

You and I are on the same page, Richard (it helps, of course, that we’vetalked before on this topic) — our Ohio repository is not only forworks that are “done” but also for works-in-progress. Coming from thelibrarian perspective (it is hard to avoid since I work for a consortiumof higher education libraries), I think of it as stewardship ofknowledge as it is being created (to contrast it with the traditionalrole of librarianship — stewardship of knowledge that is published, or“done”).

The piece that I think is missing from your acronym, though, is thenotion of storage. In a marketing sense, we’ve been trying to thinkthrough what the 15-second description of our project is, and at thispoint we’re working with:

The Ohio Digital Resource Commons will store, preserve, enable discovery of and promote collaboration with the educational and research materials of participating institutions.

The words still aren’t quite right, but the concepts are all there:storage, preservation, discovery, and collaboration. It doesn’t have anice acronym like “AMP”, either…

In an effort to help with some visualisation, I’ve developed the attacheddiagram. Do others find this at all useful? Clearly, differentinstitutions might have different user categories down the left; indeed, itmight be useful to produce sub-diagrams with each of the lower categories ofuser broken down into individual job descriptions?

This is a great diagram — and it gets to the heart of many of theconcepts I’ve been trying to get across to our own community. The onlyissue I would bring up, and perhaps this is strictly a North Americanthing, is that the term “Institutional Repository” has become toosynonymous with “dSpace” and so is really lost as a generic term-of-art. I prefer to drop the term “institutional” (after all, it clashessomewhat with the Individual-Users/Private-Space concept) and use thephrase “Content Repository”.

Attached is a different perspective on this — the repository as thefundamental digital object layer upon which many of our existingservices rest. It attempts to convey the concept of an objectrepository as a generic tool and the services on top of them asspecialized ingestion, presentation, and business rules layers. You canalso see this graphic in the context of a presentation:

http://drc-dev.ohiolink.edu/presentations/200510-summit/#slide1

(Press the space bar to step through the building up of the case for ageneral digital object repository.)

From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Sunday the 2nd of August 2015 at 10:22:29 PM UTC (+0000). The URL to this page is

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.